March 29, 2014, 04:23:05 pm

For those who don't know, Beaker is a Sphere user and developer from back in the day (even before me!). He has a degree in mathematics and he knows his stuff. While his last post on this incarnation of the Spherical Forums was about his most recent game Emergency Riot Response, he has made games in Sphere for far longer and has previously added to custom Sphere engine builds basic 3D graphics functionality, movie playback, and Wiimote capabilities.

He currently hosts his games on RPGMaker.net and certainly has plenty of variety from which to choose. These games should also be found on the Spherical Downloads Repository as well and range from platformers like Jack and Turbie to the Risk-like Warriors of the Sword and the puzzle game Entropy. The games in this list are complete and should be playable from start to finish with any vanilla Sphere 1.5 distribution (except Cheesohol which requires the Wiimote-capable custom build included with it, and maybe one other game) and certainly demonstrate a taste of what Sphere is capable of.

On my request he has uploaded a couple of his classic, but incomplete, games Larium and Resorsis to http://rpgmaker.net/users/Beaker/locker/ as I've found that more often than not when a new user is interested in a Tactics-style game we almost always point to Beaker's work for its practical and relatively quick implementations of basic pathfinding and RPG stat and inventory integration. According to Beaker, both Larium and Resorsis require old versions of Sphere to run; Resorsis specifically was made for Sphere 0.92a, which had support for MIDI files, and those would likely have to be converted in order to run on vanilla 1.5, while Larium has "spriteset alignment problems with the latest version of Sphere (works ok, but looks off)" but is said to run properly in Sphere 1.0, and "you can use compatibility mode with win98/me to get that to work." Both Larium and Resorsis should also now be found on our Downloads Repo.

There is one more game of Beaker's that I often mention when recommending his work for study: The Rainis Manuscript, a 3D Final Fantasy Tactics-like game, is, according to him, still in development but is not officially available for download. At one point a long time ago it was available for preview but no longer; instead he has made available to those who'd like to study similar techniques a tech demo Turbie's Super Fun Happy Hour. It can be found on an archived version of his old site, http://www.oocities.org/spherebeaker/ , and should be found on our Downloads Repo as well.

Ed.: For those studying programming techniques, Beaker's code is not for the faint of heart. It is recommended to get acquainted with reading and understanding other people's code first before diving into the extremely mathematical and spartan scripts of a Beaker project. Earlier works (especially Larium and Resorsis) are known to use raw numbers for array lookups instead of named properties and JS object construction for things like an RPG party member's stats or an item's common properties. It gets the job done, but even if the code's spacing is clean it's certainly not pretty. Recommended for those who want to and are ready to learn advanced mathematical techniques that can be directly applied to games in Sphere (or even game development in general) and are comfortable with reading someone else's code.

Just a heads up: I uploaded the games to the Downloads drive, too. They're in the Games (complete) and Games (demos and incomplete) folders. Besides Radnen, I think Beaker is one of the members to have released the largest amount of finished projects.